When working with Exchange 2010 it is possible to remotely connect with PowerShell to an Exchange 2010 server without having the Exchange Management tools installed on your local workstation. This is a feature known as implicit remoting. The technique to connect is very straightforward, but to make it not necessary to have to remember the commands I wrapped them up into a function Connect-ExchangeServer which I then stored in my PowerShell profile.
Whilst at VMworld Europe 2010 I attended a session on virtualising Exchange 2010. This was one of the most useful sessions I went to and whilst it confirmed a number of issues I had read about in the Best Practices Guide there was one tip I picked up from the session that was not in the guide and I thought would be useful to share.
When deploying Exchange 2010 in a Database Availability Group (DAG) on vSphere the Database and Log file disks are only currently supported on RDM disks not VMFS.
Outlook 2003 is listed as a supported client for Exchange 2010 with the following caveats:
Clients running Outlook 2003 don’t use RPC encryption, which RPC Client Access requires by default. You will either need to turn off the RPC encryption requirement or configure Outlook 2003 to use RPC encryption. However, Outlook 2007 and later versions are automatically compatible with the change to RPC Client Access because they support RPC encryption by default.
I had an excellent first impression of this experience because whilst I was waiting for the DVDs to ship from the US I was informed that the same training course was also available for me online so I could start straight away! I thought this was a fantastic idea and a terrific surprise I was not expecting. If you’re like me, then once you decide to get into a topic you want to get on with it as soon as possible, so not having to wait for the DVDs to arrive was great.
One of the major new features within Exchange 2010 is the Database Availabilty Group (DAG). This replaces High Availability options from previous versions of Exchange such as SCR and CCR - it essentially works by having multiple copies of the same Exchange databases replicated across multiple Exchange servers.
Exchange 2010 is supported on hardware virtualisation platforms provided the conditions in this Technet article are met. Whilst looking at various options for a possible Exchange 2010 deployment for a user base in the hundreds (it obviously made sense to look at what possibilities are available if deciding to virtualise the mailbox server role) I stumbled across this blog post which suggested that whilst Exchange 2010 was supported as virtual, when running a DAG it was not supported if part of a virtualised cluster.